OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Real-time topological image smoothing on shared memory parallel machines
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2016
Year: 2016

Smoothing filter is the method of choice for image preprocessing and pattern recognition. We present a new concurrent method for smoothing 2D object in binary case. Proposed method provides a parallel computation while preserving the topology by using homotopic transformations. We introduce an adapted parallelization strategy called split, distribute and merge (SDM) strategy which allows efficient parallelization of a large class of topological operators including, mainly, smoothing, skeletonization, and watershed algorithms. To achieve a good speedup, we cared about task scheduling. Distributed work during smoothing process is done by a variable number of threads. Tests on 2D binary image (512*512), using shared memory parallel machine (SMPM) with 8 CPU cores (2 Xeon E5405 running at frequency of 2 GHz), showed an enhancement of 5.2 thus a cadency of 32 images per second is achieved.
On the Secure Degrees of Freedom of the K-user MAC and 2-user Interference Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

We investigate the secure degrees of freedom (SDoF) of the K-user MIMO multiple access (MAC) and the two user MIMO interference channel. An unknown number of eavesdroppers are trying to decode the messages sent by the transmitters. Each eavesdropper is equipped with a number of antennas less than or equal to a known value NE. The legitimate transmitters and receivers are assumed to have global channel knowledge. We present the sum SDoF of the two user MIMO interference channel. We derive an upperbound on the sum SDoF of the K-user MAC channel and present an achievable scheme that partially meets the derived upperbound.
Robust Hybrid Image Watermarking based on Discrete Wavelet and Shearlet Transforms
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2016
Year: 2016

With the growth of digital networks such as the Internet, digital media have been explosively developed in e-commerce and online services. This causes problems such as illegal copy and fake ownership. Watermarking is proposed as one of the solutions to such cases. Among different watermarking techniques, the wavelet transform has been used more because of its good ability in modeling the human visual system. Recently, Shearlet transform as an extension of Wavelet transform which is based on multi-resolution and multi-directional analysis is introduced. The most important feature of this transform is the appropriate representation of image edges. In this paper a hybrid scheme using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Discrete Shearlet Transform (DST) is presented. In this way, the host image is decomposed using DWT, and then its low frequency sub-band is decomposed by DST. After that, the bidiagonal singular value decomposition (BSVD) is applied on the selected sub-band from Shearlet transform and the gray-scale watermark image is embedded into its bidiagonal singular values. The proposed method is examined on the images with different textures and resistance is evaluated against various attacks like image processing and geometric attacks. The results show good transparency and high robustness in proposed method.
Predictability of Popularity: Gaps between Prediction and Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

Can we predict the future popularity of a song, movie or tweet? Recent work suggests that although it may be hard to predict an item's popularity when it is first introduced, peeking into its early adopters and properties of their social network makes the problem easier. We test the robustness of such claims by using data from social networks spanning music, books, photos, and URLs. We find a stronger result: not only do predictive models with peeking achieve high accuracy on all datasets, they also generalize well, so much so that models trained on any one dataset perform with comparable accuracy on items from other datasets. Though practically useful, our models (and those in other work) are intellectually unsatisfying because common formulations of the problem, which involve peeking at the first small-k adopters and predicting whether items end up in the top half of popular items, are both too sensitive to the speed of early adoption and too easy. Most of the predictive power comes from looking at how quickly items reach their first few adopters, while for other features of early adopters and their networks, even the direction of correlation with popularity is not consistent across domains. Problem formulations that examine items that reach k adopters in about the same amount of time reduce the importance of temporal features, but also overall accuracy, highlighting that we understand little about why items become popular while providing a context in which we might build that understanding.
TiDeH: Time-Dependent Hawkes Process for Predicting Retweet Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

Online social networking services allow their users to post content in the form of text, images or videos. The main mechanism driving content diffusion is the possibility for users to re-share the content posted by their social connections, which may then cascade across the system. A fundamental problem when studying information cascades is the possibility to develop sound mathematical models, whose parameters can be calibrated on empirical data, in order to predict the future course of a cascade after a window of observation. In this paper, we focus on Twitter and, in particular, on the temporal patterns of retweet activity for an original tweet. We model the system by Time-Dependent Hawkes process (TiDeH), which properly takes into account the circadian nature of the users and the aging of information. The input of the prediction model are observed retweet times and structural information about the underlying social network. We develop a procedure for parameter optimization and for predicting the future profiles of retweet activity at different time resolutions. We validate our methodology on a large corpus of Twitter data and demonstrate its systematic improvement over existing approaches in all the time regimes.
A New Approach for Revising Logic Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2016
Year: 2016

Belief revision has been studied mainly with respect to background logics that are monotonic in character. In this paper we study belief revision when the underlying logic is non-monotonic instead--an inherently interesting problem that is under explored. In particular, we will focus on the revision of a body of beliefs that is represented as a logic program under the answer set semantics, while the new information is also similarly represented as a logic program. Our approach is driven by the observation that unlike in a monotonic setting where, when necessary, consistency in a revised body of beliefs is maintained by jettisoning some old beliefs, in a non-monotonic setting consistency can be restored by adding new beliefs as well. We will define a syntactic revision function and subsequently provide representation theorem for characterising it.
Building the Signature of Set Theory Using the MathSem Program
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2016
Year: 2016

Knowledge representation is a popular research field in IT. As mathematical knowledge is most formalized, its representation is important and interesting. Mathematical knowledge consists of various mathematical theories. In this paper we consider a deductive system that derives mathematical notions, axioms and theorems. All these notions, axioms and theorems can be considered as the part of elementary set theory. This theory will be represented as a semantic net.
Will 5G See its Blind Side? Evolving 5G for Universal Internet Access
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

Internet has shown itself to be a catalyst for economic growth and social equity but its potency is thwarted by the fact that the Internet is off limits for the vast majority of human beings. Mobile phones---the fastest growing technology in the world that now reaches around 80\% of humanity---can enable universal Internet access if it can resolve coverage problems that have historically plagued previous cellular architectures (2G, 3G, and 4G). These conventional architectures have not been able to sustain universal service provisioning since these architectures depend on having enough users per cell for their economic viability and thus are not well suited to rural areas (which are by definition sparsely populated). The new generation of mobile cellular technology (5G), currently in a formative phase and expected to be finalized around 2020, is aimed at orders of magnitude performance enhancement. 5G offers a clean slate to network designers and can be molded into an architecture also amenable to universal Internet provisioning. Keeping in mind the great social benefits of democratizing Internet and connectivity, we believe that the time is ripe for emphasizing universal Internet provisioning as an important goal on the 5G research agenda. In this paper, we investigate the opportunities and challenges in utilizing 5G for global access to the Internet for all (GAIA). We have also identified the major technical issues involved in a 5G-based GAIA solution and have set up a future research agenda by defining open research problems.
High-dimensional approximate nearest neighbor: k-d Generalized Randomized Forests
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2016
Year: 2016

We propose a new data-structure, the generalized randomized kd forest, or kgeraf, for approximate nearest neighbor searching in high dimensions. In particular, we introduce new randomization techniques to specify a set of independently constructed trees where search is performed simultaneously, hence increasing accuracy. We omit backtracking, and we optimize distance computations, thus accelerating queries. We release public domain software geraf and we compare it to existing implementations of state-of-the-art methods including BBD-trees, Locality Sensitive Hashing, randomized kd forests, and product quantization. Experimental results indicate that our method would be the method of choice in dimensions around 1,000, and probably up to 10,000, and pointsets of cardinality up to a few hundred thousands or even one million; this range of inputs is encountered in many critical applications today. For instance, we handle a real dataset of $10^6$ images represented in 960 dimensions with a query time of less than $1$sec on average and 90\% responses being true nearest neighbors.
Differentiable Pooling for Unsupervised Acoustic Model Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

We present a deep neural network (DNN) acoustic model that includes parametrised and differentiable pooling operators. Unsupervised acoustic model adaptation is cast as the problem of updating the decision boundaries implemented by each pooling operator. In particular, we experiment with two types of pooling parametrisations: learned $L_p$-norm pooling and weighted Gaussian pooling, in which the weights of both operators are treated as speaker-dependent. We perform investigations using three different large vocabulary speech recognition corpora: AMI meetings, TED talks and Switchboard conversational telephone speech. We demonstrate that differentiable pooling operators provide a robust and relatively low-dimensional way to adapt acoustic models, with relative word error rates reductions ranging from 5--20% with respect to unadapted systems, which themselves are better than the baseline fully-connected DNN-based acoustic models. We also investigate how the proposed techniques work under various adaptation conditions including the quality of adaptation data and complementarity to other feature- and model-space adaptation methods, as well as providing an analysis of the characteristics of each of the proposed approaches.
Data Collection for Interactive Learning through the Dialog
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

This paper presents a dataset collected from natural dialogs which enables to test the ability of dialog systems to learn new facts from user utterances throughout the dialog. This interactive learning will help with one of the most prevailing problems of open domain dialog system, which is the sparsity of facts a dialog system can reason about. The proposed dataset, consisting of 1900 collected dialogs, allows simulation of an interactive gaining of denotations and questions explanations from users which can be used for the interactive learning.
Capacity of Remotely Powered Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

Motivated by recent developments in wireless power transfer, we study communication with a remotely powered transmitter. We propose an information-theoretic model where a charger can dynamically decide on how much power to transfer to the transmitter based on its side information regarding the communication, while the transmitter needs to dynamically adapt its coding strategy to its instantaneous energy state, which in turn depends on the actions previously taken by the charger. We characterize the capacity as an $n$-letter mutual information rate under various levels of side information available at the charger. When the charger is finely tunable to different energy levels, referred to as a "precision charger", we show that these expressions reduce to single-letter form and there is a simple and intuitive joint charging and coding scheme achieving capacity. The precision charger scenario is motivated by the observation that in practice the transferred energy can be controlled by simply changing the amplitude of the beamformed signal. When the charger does not have sufficient precision, for example when it is restricted to use a few discrete energy levels, we show that the computation of the $n$-letter capacity can be cast as a Markov decision process if the channel is noiseless. This allows us to numerically compute the capacity for specific cases and obtain insights on the corresponding optimal policy, or even to obtain closed form analytical solutions by solving the corresponding Bellman equations, as we demonstrate through examples. Our findings provide some surprising insights on how side information at the charger can be used to increase the overall capacity of the system.
Audio-Visual Speaker Diarization Based on Spatiotemporal Bayesian Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Speaker diarization consists of assigning speech signals to people engaged in a dialogue. An audio-visual spatiotemporal diarization model is proposed. The model is well suited for challenging scenarios that consist of several participants engaged in multi-party interaction while they move around and turn their heads towards the other participants rather than facing the cameras and the microphones. Multiple-person visual tracking is combined with multiple speech-source localization in order to tackle the speech-to-person association problem. The latter is solved within a novel audio-visual fusion method on the following grounds: binaural spectral features are first extracted from a microphone pair, then a supervised audio-visual alignment technique maps these features onto an image, and finally a semi-supervised clustering method assigns binaural spectral features to visible persons. The main advantage of this method over previous work is that it processes in a principled way speech signals uttered simultaneously by multiple persons. The diarization itself is cast into a latent-variable temporal graphical model that infers speaker identities and speech turns, based on the output of an audio-visual association process, executed at each time slice, and on the dynamics of the diarization variable itself. The proposed formulation yields an efficient exact inference procedure. A novel dataset, that contains audio-visual training data as well as a number of scenarios involving several participants engaged in formal and informal dialogue, is introduced. The proposed method is thoroughly tested and benchmarked with respect to several state-of-the art diarization algorithms.
EMBERS at 4 years: Experiences operating an Open Source Indicators Forecasting System
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2016
Year: 2016

EMBERS is an anticipatory intelligence system forecasting population-level events in multiple countries of Latin America. A deployed system from 2012, EMBERS has been generating alerts 24x7 by ingesting a broad range of data sources including news, blogs, tweets, machine coded events, currency rates, and food prices. In this paper, we describe our experiences operating EMBERS continuously for nearly 4 years, with specific attention to the discoveries it has enabled, correct as well as missed forecasts, and lessons learnt from participating in a forecasting tournament including our perspectives on the limits of forecasting and ethical considerations.
Waveform Design for Wireless Power Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

Far-field Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) has attracted significant attention in recent years. Despite the rapid progress, the emphasis of the research community in the last decade has remained largely concentrated on improving the design of energy harvester (so-called rectenna) and has left aside the effect of transmitter design. In this paper, we study the design of transmit waveform so as to enhance the DC power at the output of the rectenna. We derive a tractable model of the non-linearity of the rectenna and compare with a linear model conventionally used in the literature. We then use those models to design novel multisine waveforms that are adaptive to the channel state information (CSI). Interestingly, while the linear model favours narrowband transmission with all the power allocated to a single frequency, the non-linear model favours a power allocation over multiple frequencies. Through realistic simulations, waveforms designed based on the non-linear model are shown to provide significant gains (in terms of harvested DC power) over those designed based on the linear model and over non-adaptive waveforms. We also compute analytically the theoretical scaling laws of the harvested energy for various waveforms as a function of the number of sinewaves and transmit antennas. Those scaling laws highlight the benefits of CSI knowledge at the transmitter in WPT and of a WPT design based on a non-linear rectenna model over a linear model. Results also motivate the study of a promising architecture relying on large-scale multisine multi-antenna waveforms for WPT. As a final note, results stress the importance of modeling and accounting for the non-linearity of the rectenna in any system design involving wireless power.
Learning a Pose Lexicon for Semantic Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

This paper presents a novel method for learning a pose lexicon comprising semantic poses defined by textual instructions and their associated visual poses defined by visual features. The proposed method simultaneously takes two input streams, semantic poses and visual pose candidates, and statistically learns a mapping between them to construct the lexicon. With the learned lexicon, action recognition can be cast as the problem of finding the maximum translation probability of a sequence of semantic poses given a stream of visual pose candidates. Experiments evaluating pre-trained and zero-shot action recognition conducted on MSRC-12 gesture and WorkoutSu-10 exercise datasets were used to verify the efficacy of the proposed method.
Lower-Cost epsilon-Private Information Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2016
Year: 2016

Private Information Retrieval (PIR), despite being well studied, is computationally costly and arduous to scale. We explore lower-cost relaxations of information-theoretic PIR, based on dummy queries, sparse vectors, and compositions with an anonymity system. We prove the security of each scheme using a flexible differentially private definition for private queries that can capture notions of imperfect privacy. We show that basic schemes are weak, but some of them can be made arbitrarily safe by composing them with large anonymity systems.
Building an Internet Radio System with Interdisciplinary factored system for automatic content recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2016
Year: 2016

Automatic systems for music content recommendation have assumed a new role in recent years. These systems have transformed from being just a convenient, standalone tool into an inseparable element of modern living. In addition, not only do these systems strongly influence human moods and feelings with the selection of proper music content, but they also provide significant commercial and advertising opportunities. This research aims to examine and implement two such systems available for the automatic recognition and recommendation of music and advertisement content for Internet radio. Through analysis of the practical issues of application fields and spheres of influence, conclusions will be drawn about the possible perspectives on and future role of such systems. Other content adaptation that is based on music genres will be discussed, as wellAnother aim of this study is to provide an innovative Internet radio implementation as compared to traditional radio and other Internet broadcast solutions. This will include automatic content recommendation systems for listeners and marketing companies, as well as the usage of a voice synthesizer in in automatic program scheduling.
Integrated Control/Structure Design of a Large Space Structure using Structured $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ Control
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2016
Year: 2016

This study presents the integrated control/structure design of a Large Flexible Structure, the Extra Long Mast Observatory (ELMO). The integrated design is performed using structured $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ control tools, developing the Two-Input Two-Output Port (TITOP) model of the flexible multi-body structure and imposing integrated design specifications as $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ constraints. The integrated control/structure design for ELMO consists of optimizing simultaneously its payload mass and control system for low-frequency perturbation rejection respecting bandwidth requirements.
How to Transfer? Zero-Shot Object Recognition via Hierarchical Transfer of Semantic Attributes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Attribute based knowledge transfer has proven very successful in visual object analysis and learning previously unseen classes. However, the common approach learns and transfers attributes without taking into consideration the embedded structure between the categories in the source set. Such information provides important cues on the intra-attribute variations. We propose to capture these variations in a hierarchical model that expands the knowledge source with additional abstraction levels of attributes. We also provide a novel transfer approach that can choose the appropriate attributes to be shared with an unseen class. We evaluate our approach on three public datasets: aPascal, Animals with Attributes and CUB-200-2011 Birds. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model with significant improvement over state-of-the-art.